Silent Hill HD Collection for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

I feel bad about rating these games a 3/10, and in fact I am not saying that the games themselves are bad--in fact, they're amazing--but this 'collection' is beyond bad. It's downright horrifying.

The graphics are 'cleaned up' so much that the gritty, foggy, rusted worlds are now pristine and free of tension or character. The sound, likewise, has been tampered with to such a point that the original PS2 version is superior in every way. Even the sound of walking on steal plates, like in Silent Hill 3, is made clunky and poorly recorded/put out. There is also a myriad of sound syncing issues. The game's voice track struggles to match the lips of the characters' mouths in an obvious and sad way. The sound of swinging a sword or shooting a gun is often lagged and plays noticeably later than it should. It's embarrassing, really.

Then there's the actual bugs and glitches. This game is a mess. It struggles frequently with frame rate issues. In Silent Hill 3, which has more enemies on screen at once, the game often slows to a crawl as the main character runs in slow motion. The screen will often jerk around while loading, and sometimes a simple action like moving the camera around will cause immense slow down and lag. It's sad when this supposed 'HD Collection' for the powerhouse systems of 2012 struggles to run this years old PS2 game. It boggles the mind.

Again, the games themselves are not actually bad. It's the port--this 'remastering' that is the stinker here, and man does it stink. It ruins the entire experience. For that reason, I highly recommend finding the PS2 originals. For Silent Hill 2, there is also an Xbox version which is better than this port. Both games also have PC versions, though they may be hard to find. Silent Hill 3, in particular, looks great on PC and will run well on most gaming rigs. So please, play these games...just pass on this 'collection'.

P.S. You wouldn't know it by this 'collection', but there is also a Silent Hill 4 for the

A five-gig download is what awaits you, followed by a long installation. That's how you're introduced to this iteration of the game, and it's a pretty appropriate introduction. For character and environment physics based on a PS2 game, one would think the PS3 would be able to handle the game gracefully, but it doesn't. You get slowdown less than a minute into SH3. I'm dead serious. Nothing was done to fix the awkward, motion-sickness-inducing camera swings, and the character models were just sharpened instead of upgraded. A good emulator will do the same thing, and it won't cost you the extra money (or queue slot, as the case may be).

These titles were gorgeous and groundbreaking on the PS2, but their dialogue was forced and the voice acting induced eye-rolls from start to finish, and seeing that kind of neglect carry over into this generation of consoles makes me cringe. It's like being shown of your sophomore high school yearbook photo and reminded of how much about your appearance you thought wasn't all that noticeable, only to have it come screaming back to you.

Those who are willing to put real thought into their gaming will find cause to liken this unto highlighter scribbled across all of the flaws of the series, putting a soul-jabbing context on the many mistakes it continues to make. Sloppy, cliche, and aimless. I still love the overall story of SH2, but nothing about either title has aged better than your average glass of milk left on the counter. Neither title had a technologically or generational need to be brought to HD (especially not without SH1), and this ends up nothing more than a sadly transparent cash grab whose target audience consists only of PS3 owners who never had a PS2 and who can forgive character models and voice synch limited by the older system's tech. Oh, and people who knew nothing of the series and were drawn in by the random O-face on the cover.

Silent Hill 2 and 3 are 2 of my top 10 games. Mind you Fatal Frame 2 and Xenosaga trilogy rate above it however they are 6th (3) and 5th (2) on my favorite games list. This port however butchers the series in such a way I thought impossible. The game was so terrible Konami released a day 1 patch that fixed....absolutely nothing.

Silent Hill 2 suffers slow downs and the new voice overs are horrendous to the point I'm happy they released it with the original voice overs. However the voices are out of sync and sometimes I feel like i'm watching a chinese dubbed movie with the way the lips move and the voices speak. The HD graphics are crisp, however the game suffers lag at times. It feels like i'll be running at regular speed, 60 frames per second, then I suddenly drop to about 5 or 6 frames.

Silent Hill 3 suffers all the problems above...however at a more constant pace. The slow down accounts for 90% of the game. What should have taken a speed runner 2 hours and 15 mins to complete (my last speed run time, knowing where everything was, on easy) took 4 hours and 10 mins however the game still logged me at 2 hours and 9 mins. The slowdown is THAT bad. The new voice overs are horrible, however konami in this case couldnt release the original voices due to Heather Morris not signing off on her voice work. People claim they couldn't find her however its the same Heather Morris who voiced Cheryl Mason in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories so Konami has her contact info. The new voices are so terrible I muted the game and put on a series of cutscenes on my laptop and hooked in Headphones to play when a cutscene played. The only actress who seems to care in Either game is the new Heather, at least she sounds invested, the other guys just phone it in.

If you want to play these games in crisp clear definition, buy a 25 dollar Playstation 2, grab Silent Hill 2 Greatest Hits, and Silent hill 3, and hook it up with a Component cable. Still cheeper than this watered down port

If you want to play the worst HD port of your life, then SH HD Collection is for you!

First, Silent Hill 2 HD

With extreme lag, stuttering, hitching, slow-mo, frame-skipping, and freezing non-stop even after a 300mb patch. The lag screws with the controls, making turning more difficult and quick-turn a hit-or-miss. The lag also has a hand in putting the horrible, awful new voice overs out of sync by 2 to 5 seconds!

The audio is garbage. Bad volume levels, wrong pitch for monsters, random SFX. No stereo leveling. End credits are so distorted they will blow your eardrums. Monsters in the game had their audio swapped to a frentic mess of noise.

Graphics look terrible. Game is letterboxed during cutscenes, unless when they forget to put letterbox on. Shadows are not anti-aliased and blocky. Textures on the streets were changed to make them look freshly renovated and clean. Any prerendered CG cinematic is suffering from low bitrate and no enhancements. They all look terrible (this includes the intro and credits). Sometimes there's pop-up. Sometimes the rope/nooses don't load for the 6 hanged criminals puzzle, so they are just floating in air. Sometimes the upside-down bodies in baskets don't load in Pyramid Head's room.

There is a 2 second blackness between going through doors, or activating cutscenes. Because of this, it is hard to get anywhere fast, and you can sometimes get lost. Also because of this 2 seconds of black, it cut the suggestive scene with Pyramid Head and two mannequins in the apartments. It also cut the scene of opening a can of... lightbulbs.

New voices do not get the point, nor match their characters. The acting is not very good at all compared to the originals. The one nice thing I can say about the game is that you can play with original SH2 voices. But the game is still too laggy to sync their lips to the voices and some actors were changed anyway, like the doctor and game-show host (he is the worst).

Don't buy it. Don't even

i'm going to be brutally honest, its not really scary. neither of them. the levels are lovingly created and designed, but its extremely hard to get into.

there are some absolutely ridiculous effects designed mainly to pad it out, such as the debilitating fog that just cuts off half of your view (thankfully gone in the sequel). however, its not nearly as bad as the darkness (made a core gameplay feature in the sequel), and i'm going to rant here for a second.

its so bad that it made me assume that the redesigners decided to stop making the graphics better and instead decided to make it nearly impossible to see even on the brightest settings, gamma all the way up, and the flashlight on. IN BRIGHTLY LIT PLACES. it gets even worse in the next one, where near the beginning you have to find your way through hallways filled with enemies, randomly interacting with walls hoping to find a door that isnt broken.

the controls are gimmicky and annoying. theres only one camera control that centers the camera behind your head, and to attack you have to hold one button while pressing a different one. and it never tells you this. or anything.

the puzzles are just stupidly rediculous. theres one in SH3 that requires you to put books on a shelf, and its literally impossible if you dont know the works of shakespeare. which the main character openly admits to.

the story seems forced, like a fill in the blank puzzle found in a doctors office with half of the spots filled in with nonsense.

on the bright side, the music is AMAZING... in SH2. and the enemy design is awesome in both, but prepare to see the same monsters a million times over. but thats pretty much all of the bright side things i can think of.

if it wasnt painfully obvious, this is my first review. but if you seriously need to play it, get a version for the ps2, so that you dont have to deal with my biggest complain

Sloppy, lazy, inept...these are the words I would use to describe the people in charge of making Silent Hill HD Collection(PS3). Silent Hill 2 and 3 were and still are amazing games and are classics of the survival horror genre. But these ports are simply atrocious. Frame rates that stutter, chug and freeze to the point of making the games unplayable. Horrible lip-syncing during cut scenes and delayed or nonexistent audio effects. And the fog...how do you mess up the fog? Silent Hill 2 actually looked better on the PS2! There's also some odd control issues in Silent Hill 2 where the buttons simply stop working for no reason. Combine these control issues with the slow as molasses frame rate and you get a frustrating and disappointing experience that will make you want to dust off your PS2 and play the original games. Speaking of which, I have SH2 and SH3 for the PS2. I can pop them in right now and immediately start playing them with no trouble or waiting. So can somebody out there tell me WHY Silent Hill HD Collection requires a 4GB install and a 297MB patch??? These games are a decade old! Why can my little PS2 handle these games like a champ but my PS3 can barely run them, even after taking up 4% of the HDD? There's simply no excuse for ports as shoddy as this and Konami and Hijinx Studios should be ashamed of themselves. If you've never played SH2 or SH3 but you really want to check them out, do yourself a favor and hunt down the original PS2 or XBox versions. That way you won't be severely disappointed or get the wrong impression about these wonderful games. Let this game be a lesson for all developers out there that are thinking of doing an HD collection...THIS is how you do it WRONG.

Ever since I played the original PS2 version of Silent Hill 2, I was hooked.

From the creepy simple landscape to the disturbing monsters that fill the ashy world of SH.

In this version most of the frame rate problems have been fixed to move much faster and more fluently without pause. In some ways I feel this was a mistake, and the reason I say that is because the framerate from the original is what made the game a little more realistic.

But none the less I have no other complaints. The graphics are much sharper and with cleaner lines. All in all still a classic.

Im a stickler for the original voices from the game and not the new ones. Its so wierd to listen to!

This is a must have game for your collection.

I was expecting a much different game. I enjoyed the first 2 installments and this is the next I have decided to try. It was very hard to see anything, but I know that is part of the premise of the game. The thing that disappointed me was not having any type of real control of the camera movement, it was so sporatic to when or if the view would change which made it very diffucult to maneuver. I lasted approximately 20 minutes and then couldn't handle the views anymore.

I was hoping for an update on an old classic but little has changed.
The control schema is awkward, the game play frustrating, the environments are repetitive and dull.
This game has excellent atmosphere and horror potential though; which is why I was looking forward to an updated version, but this is not an updated version, just an old game that really doesn’t hold up.

What can I say about Silent Hill 2 and 3, they are both probably the two most challenging games I've ever played. Not because of the action, but because the puzzles are so intense they make your head spin. These are the first to Silent Hills I played from the franchise and I have to say that they are two of the most scariest games I've ever played. The in game play definitely messes with your mind at some parts to the point where you don't know whats going on or what your supposed to do. I wasn't too fond of the controls when I first started playing the game, but after a while I got used to it and both of these games ended up being great games to play in the long run. Saying Silent Hill is scary is a huge understatement. These are two of the most creepiest and horrifying games you will ever play. This is survival horror at its best. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in trying out the Silent Hill franchise or is a fan of survival horror.

Reading the reviews I can understand why such low scores (pre-patch). I started playing them after the patches for the PS3 so I guess I got lucky. But these games were my favorite in the series. They always will be. They are originals and should be graded as such. These games shaped survival horror for the future. Dead Space, Assylum, and other next gen survival horror titles wouldn't be what they are today if it weren't for the Silent Hill series (aside from The Room, you didn't even go to Silent Hill in that one). After Playing I realized that I was experiencing them for the first time again. Hearing noises that I could never hear before. Also seeing things that I didn't understand playing them on an old tube TV. For example; In the apartment building in SH2 after you get the flashlight on the second floor you see pyramid head standing behind some bars in the hallway. Back when these games were released, I had no idea that's what it was. Games are art. People put years of their lives into these games based on ideas. I think we should give them credit where credit is due. (Aside from the XBOX 360 version. I heard Konami is offering credit towards other Konami titles in exchange if you bought it and can produce a reciept.) But they were and are still very great games.

I read a LOT of reviews about how the version originally released was broken to the level of being almost unplayable. The PS3 version was patched, but not the Xbox360 (so don't even think about getting this on X360 over PS3). Reviews stated that the patch made things good, and I will agree. The only issue I saw was in SH3 where the game might freeze for 1/10 to 1/4 of a second, but it never effected the game.

As for the games themselves, they actually were quite good. I personally didn't care for them, and my gut tells me that they won't be most people's favorite survival horror games. They just felt a little too heavy on the puzzle side of survival horror games. I truly enjoyed having the option to play the action and puzzle portions at differing difficulties in both games, which threw in real replayability. But, nothing made me jump like a Resident Evil, and action always felt to take a backseat. Even though action wasn't the primary focus, and the puzzles that were there were interesting, they didn't live up to what I like in puzzle games: all out in your face puzzles.

The stories are both off-kilter, but do raise some mature thoughts (death of a loved one, good vs evil, etc). There are also other alternate endings, where you can see a glimpse of the quirky side of Japanese culture.

It's rare that I'll rate a game highly because I see the quality in a game, even if I don't like it. If this series had a different balance that matched my tastes, I'd definitely say that this would be the rare game I'd buy. Since it didn't, I just played through each game a few times, and still am happy I rented the game.

If you've never tried Silent Hill and are curious, definitely get this game in your queue!

Silent hill HD collection provides Gamers to enjoy Silent hill 2 & 3 on next gen consoles. people complain about the controls and the claustraphobia inducing darkness and the camera angles, but ignore the good stuff.
Both games provide excellant stories, a number of both fun and irritating puzzles, a variety of scary monsters to battle and unforgettable characters.
To make things even better they enhanced the graphics and improved the Voice acting, making the games look and sound spiffy for the 360 and PS3. Some people complain about how the new voices dont fit the characters or that the graphics arent that good, but they are wrong. sure the graphics arent Resident evil 5 or Call of Duty good, but they fit the bill, and the voice acting? well thats their opinion. i personally have no problem with it.

these games are pretty good the horror is soo nice i prefer original voices but anyway this is a really good game i highly recommend it

The reason I am giving this a bad review is because the games are somewhat to not playable at all. I thought a HD remaster suppose to be better than the original. I guess I am wrong. For starters, silent hill 2 is a little playable. The problem is while playing it, it suffers lagging and major slowdowns. Also, the voices do not match the characters anymore. The sync is way off. That is just part 2. Part 3 has the same problems but worse. Silent Hill 3 was one of my favorite games back on PS2. They have ruined both games. I do give credit for the HD revamp. The graphics do look much nicer. In the end, I would rather buy these 2 on PS2 again than play this collection. Save your time and GameQ List and skip this title and just buy them on PS2.

I recently got into the Silent Hill series with Origins for the PSP. I tried Homecoming a few years ago, but the lack of inverted Y axis made it unplayable.
I'm used to old-style controls such as the classic 90's Tomb Raiders, and even the first Silent Hill, where "forward" moves the characters forward no matter which way they are facing. But with those titles the camera is almost always behind the character, so "forward" really is usually forward.
The camera in Silent Hill 2 is terrible. The angle changes from one arbitrary static position to another far too often. It is impossible not to walk into a wall every 10 seconds. Maybe the design is to make it more nerve-rattling, but to me it is just frustrating and no fun at all. I'm glad I just rented it.
I wish I would have known just how bad the camera and controls are. I wouldn't have even wasted the rental.

DO NOT rent this! I have been a long time silent hill fan since the very first one came out. This HD remake of SH 2 and 3 is pathetic, glitches from the start of the game all the way to end. Pausing loading even while trying to just walk down the street. Feels like your playing an untested beta, which is truly sad considering that SH 2 came out more than a decade ago and run smoothly with no problems. This remake feels like it was done by someone who didn't really give a #$%# if anyone played or not. A real slap in the face to long time SH fans.

I was eagerly anticipating the opportunity to play the highly revered Silent Hill series because I was much too young and skittish to handle the games when they were first released. Unfortunately much to my dismay the game design is painfully dated and aggravating despite all of the commendable stylistic choices. The controls are inexcusable and are probably why the survival horror genre will remain forever a niche unlike horror films known for their mass appeal. What aggravated me the most was the distribution of ammunition in confined areas which you are not allowed to leave. The first hospital stage left me facing a boss face with the bare minimum of supplies and a stick for my alternative and since nothing regenerates and the games prohibits the character from leaving the stage based on its absurd logic I was left with the option to either start the game over or try to beat an enemy with a stick. This all occurred in Silent Hill 2 which up to that part I had found myself enjoying to a fair degree and then the callous design of the game essentially spat in my face.

I only rented this for Silent Hill 3 because it was better and I did not like Silent Hill 2 at all only fighting Pyramid Head because he is a beast. Silent Hill is too much running and you die in 2 hits and the controls suck in it. Seeing both games in HD is so much better than the PS2 version because it is so much more crisp and environment seems more creepier than before. Other than that had not problem with the game

I loved silent hill 2 when I was younger. It was and still is one of my favorite horror style games ever. I don't know what went wrong but good god these HD versions suck. The annoying stepping sounds where it sounds like you are stepping on a bag of chips everytime you take a step, the horrible controls/camera angles, and the down right horrible frame rate...DO NOT RENT THIS! I played both SH2 and SH3 for about 10 minutes turn it off and cursed myself for wasting my time!

For a game that is suppose to be toughted in HD, the graphics still look maybe PS1 to PS2 at best. The controls are awful. couldn't even make it past 5 minutes.

very boring,not scary or frightful at all,, ridiculous footstep noises become aggrevating ,, but the controls and confusing,idiotic puzzles made me hit delete after several hours on both games,,, and I NEVER RECEIVED ONE TROPHY... sent this one back quickly

trust me don't get this game the control is so shtty.

This Game Sucked! The Graphics is the worst, Did they not get the memo? we're in 2012, Graphics has come a long way since the first silent hill, this game was terrible, absolute worst game ive rented here